The Feast of Love (2 page)

Inside the stadium, I feel the hushed moonlight on my back and sit down on a metal bench. The August meteor shower now seems to be part of this show. I am two thirds of the way up. These seats are too high for visibility and too coldly metallic for comfort, but the place is so massive that it makes most individual judgments irrelevant. Like any coliseum, it defeats privacy and solitude through sheer size. Carved out of the earth, sized for hordes and giants, bloody injuries and shouting, and so massive that no glance can take it all in, the stadium can be considered the staging ground for epic events, and not just football: in 1964, President Lyndon Baines Johnson announced his Great Society program here.

On every home-game Saturday in the fall, blimps and biplanes pulling advertising banners putter in semicircles overhead. Starting about three hours before kickoff, our street begins to be clogged with parked cars and RVs driven by midwesterners in various states of happy pre-inebriation, and when I rake the leaves in my back yard I hear the tidal clamor of the crowd in the distance, half a mile away. The crowd at the game is loudly traditional and antiphonal: one side of the stadium roars
GO
and the other side roars
BLUE.
The sounds rise to the sky, also blue, but nonpartisan.

The moonlight reflects off the rows of stands. I look down at the field, now, at 1:45 in the morning. A midsummer night’s dream is being enacted down there.

This old moon wanes! She lingers my desires
and those of a solitary naked couple, barely visible down there right now on the fifty-yard line, making love, on this midsummer night.

They are making soft distant audibles.

—

 
BACK OUT ON THE SIDEWALK,
I turn west and walk toward Allmendinger Park. I see the park’s basketball hoops and tennis courts and monkey bars illuminated dimly by the streetlight. Near the merry-go-round, the city planners have bolted several benches into the ground for sedentary parents watching their children. I used to watch my son from that very spot. As I stroll by on the sidewalk, I think I see someone, some shadowy figure in a jacket, emerging as if out of a fog or mist, sitting on a bench accompanied by a dog, but certainly not watching any children, this man, not at this time of night, and as I draw closer, he looks up, and so does the dog, a somewhat nondescript collie-Labrador-shepherd mix. I know this dog. I also know the man sitting next to him. I have known him for years. His arms are flung out on both sides of the bench, and his legs are crossed, and in addition to the jacket (a dark blue Chicago Bulls windbreaker), he’s wearing a baseball hat, as if he were not quite adult, as if he had not
quite
given up the dreams of youth and athletic grace and skill. His name is Bradley W. Smith.

His chinos are one size too large for him — they bag around his hips and his knees — and he’s wearing a shirt with a curious design that I cannot quite make out, an interlocking M. C. Escher giraffe pattern, giraffes linked to giraffes, but it can’t be that, it can’t be what I think it is. In the dark my friend looks like an exceptionally handsome toad. The dog snaps at a moth, then puts his head on his owner’s leg. I might be hallucinating the giraffes on the man’s shirt, or I might simply be mistaken. He glances at me in the dark as I sit down next to him on the bench.

“Hey,” he says, “Charlie. What the hell are you doing out here? What’s up?”

“HEY,” HE SAYS,
“Charlie. What the hell are you doing here? What’s up?”

Sitting down next to him, I can see his glasses, which reflect the last crescent of the moon and a dim shooting star. In the half-dark he has a handsome mild face, thick curly hair and an easy disarming smile, like that of a bank loan officer who has not quite decided whether your credit history is worthy of you. His eyes are large and pensive, toadlike. I realize quickly that if he is sitting out here on this park bench, now, he must be a rather unlucky man, insomniac or haunted or heartsick.

“Hey, Bradley,” I say. “Not much. Walkin’ around. It’s a midsummer night, and I’ve got insomnia. I see you’re still awake, too.”

“Yeah,” he says, nodding unnecessarily, “that’s the truth.”

We both wait. Finally I ask him, “How come you’re up?”

“Me? Oh, I found myself working late on a window in my house. The sash weight broke loose from the pulley and I’ve been trying to get it out from inside the wall.”

“Difficult job.”

“Right. Anyway, I quit that, and I’ve been walking Bradley the dog, since I couldn’t fix the window. Do you remember this dog?”

“His name is . . . what?”

“Bradley. I just told you. Exact same as mine. It’s easier to call him ‘Junior.’ That way, there’s no confusion. He’s my company. But you’re not sleeping either, right?” he asks, staring off into the middle distance as if he were talking to himself, as if I were an intimation of him. “That makes the two of us.” He leans back. “Three of us, if you count the dog.”

“I woke up,” I tell him, “and I was seeing things.”

“What things?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I tell him.

“Okay.”

“Oh, you know. I was seeing spots.”

“Spots?”

“Yes. Like spots in front of your eyes. But these were more like cogs.”

“You mean like gears or something?”

“I guess so. Wheels with cogs turning, and then getting closer to each other, so that they all turned together, their gears meshing.” I rub my arm, mosquito bite.

In the shadows, one side of his face seems about to collapse, as if the effort to keep up appearances has finally failed and daylight optimism has abandoned him. He sighs and scratches Junior behind the ears. In response, the dog smiles broadly. “Gears. I never heard of that one. I guess you
don’t
sleep any better than I do. We’re two members of the insomnia army.” He stretches now and reaches up to grab some air. “A brotherhood. And sisterhood. Did you know that Marlene Dietrich was a great insomniac?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Do you know what she did to keep herself occupied at night?”

“No, I don’t.”

“She baked cakes,” he tells me. “I read this in the Sunday paper. She baked angel food cakes and then in the daytime she gave them away to her friends. Marlene Dietrich. She looked like she did, those eyes of hers, because she couldn’t sleep well. Now me,” he says, rearranging himself on the bench, “I just sit still here,
very
still, you know, like what’s-his-name, the compassionate Buddha, thinking about the world, the one you and I live in, and I come to conclusions. Conclusions and remedies. Lately I’ve been thinking of
extreme remedies.
For extreme problems we need extreme remedies. That’s the phrase.”

“ ‘Extreme remedies’? What d’you mean? And don’t go putting me in your brotherhood. I’m just on a neighborhood stroll.”

“ ‘A neighborhood stroll’! Man,” he says, pointing a revolver-finger at me, “you’ll be lucky if a patrol car doesn’t pick you up.”

“Oh, I’m respectable,” I tell him.

“Listen to yourself. ‘Respectable’! You’re dressed like a vagabond. A
goon.
It’s illegal to walk around at night in this town, didn’t you know that?” He stands up to give me an inquiring once-over. He apparently doesn’t like what he sees. “It makes you look like a danger to public safety. Vagrancy! They’ll haul your ass down to jail, man. They don’t allow it anymore unless you have a dog with you. The dog” — he nods at his own dog — “makes it legal. The dog makes it legitimate.
I
have a dog. You should have a dog. It’s best to have an upper-class dog like a collie or a golden retriever, a licensed dog. But any dog will do. Believe me, the happy people are all at home and asleep, snuggled together in their dreams.” He says this phrase with contempt. “All the lucky ones.” He sits down but still seems agitated. “The goddamn lucky ones . . . What’s your trouble?” He grins at me gnomishly. “Conscience bothering you? Got a writing block?”

“No. I
told
you. I woke up disoriented. It happens all the time. Thinking about a book, I guess. I have to walk it off. Anyway, I already have a dog.”

“I didn’t know that. Where is it?” He glances around, pretending to search.

“Sleeping. She doesn’t like to walk with me at night. She doesn’t like how disoriented I am.”

“Smart. So what you’re saying is, you don’t know where you are? Is that it?”

“Right. I know where I am
now.”

“Maybe you’re too involved with fiction. Well, don’t mind me. But listen, since we’re here, tell me: how does this new book of yours begin? What’s the first line?”

I start to pick some chewing gum off my shoe. “Nope. I don’t do that. I don’t give things like that away.”

“Come on. I’m your neighbor, Charlie. I’ve known you, what is it — ?”

“Twelve years,” I say.

“Twelve years. You think I’m going to steal your line? I would never do that. I
don’t
do that. I’m not a writer, thank God. I’m a businessman. And an artist. Go ahead. Just tell me. Tell me how your novel starts.”

I sit back for a moment. “ ‘The man,’ ” I recite, “ ‘me — no one else, it seems — wakes in fright.’ ”

He kicks the toe of his shoe in the dirt and tanbark, and Junior sniffs at it. Now Bradley tries out a sympathetic tone. “That’s the line?”

“That’s the line. It’s still in rough draft. Actually, it’s just in my head.”

He nods. “Kind of melodramatic, though, right? I thought it was a cardinal rule not to start a novel with someone waking up in bed. And what’s all this about
fright?
Do you really awaken in terror? That doesn’t seem like you at all. And by the way I believe the word is
awakens.”

Irritated, I stare at him. “When did you become Mr. Usage? All right, I’ll revise it. Besides, I
do
wake in terror. Ask my wife.”

“No, I would never do that. What’s the book called?”

“I have no idea.”

“You should call it
The Feast of Love.
I’m the expert on that. I should write that book. Actually, I should be
in
that book. You should put me into your novel. I’m an expert on love. I’ve just broken up with my second wife, after all. I’m in an emotional tangle. Maybe I’d shoot myself before the final chapter. Your readers would wonder about the outcome. Yeah, the feast of love. It certainly isn’t what I expected when I was in high school and I was imagining what love was going to be, honeymoon jaunts, joy forever and that sort of thing.”

I glance at the dog, who is yawning in my face. I bore this dog. “Aren’t you going out with a doctor now? Some new woman?”

“That’s private.”

“Hey, you came up with the title, and then you decide I can’t have it because it’s a metaphor? And you want to be a character in this book, and you won’t give me the details of your love life?”

“Metaphor my ass. I don’t know. Call it
The Feast of Love.
I know: call it
Unchain My Heart.
Now there’s a good title. Call it anything you want to. But remember: metaphors mean something,” he says, sitting up. Junior also sits up. “You remember Kathryn, my ex? My first ex? When Kathryn called me a toad, which she did sometimes to punish me, I’m sure she chose that metaphor carefully. She took great care with her language. She was fastidious. She probably searched for that metaphor all day. She went
shopping
for metaphors, Kathryn did. X marked the spot where she found them. Then she displayed them, all these metaphors, to me. After a while it became her nickname for me, as in ‘Toad, my love, would you pass the potatoes?’ They were always about
me,
these metaphors, as it turned out. She got that one from
The Wind in the Willows,
her favorite book. You know: Mr. Toad?”

He says this in his low voice and surveys the gloom of the playground, and now, in the dark, he does sound a bit like a toad.

“It could have been worse,” he informs me. “A toad has dignity.” He looks around. Then he breaks into song.

The Clever Men at Oxford
Know all that there is to be knowed
But they none of them know one
half as much
As intelligent Mr. Toad.

“Anyway, I got on her nerves after a while. And of course, she was a lesbian, sort of, a little bit of one, a sexual tourist, but we could have handled the tourism part, given enough time. At least that’s what I thought. The real problem was that she didn’t like how inconsistent I was. She thought I was the man of a thousand faces, nice in the morning, not so nice at night. Men like me exasperated her. She once called me the Lon Chaney of the Midwest, the Lon Chaney with the monster light bulb burning inside his cheekbone.
The phantom,
she called me,
of the opera.”
He waits for a moment. “What opera? There’s no opera in this town.”

He stares up into the night sky, then continues. “Well, at least I was a star. You know, women admire physical beauty in men more than they claim they do.” He says this to me conspiratorially, as if imparting a deep secret. He sighs. “Don’t kid yourself on that score.”

“I would never kid myself about that,” I tell him. “This isn’t Diana you’re talking about? This is Kathryn?”

“No,” he sighs angrily, “not Diana. Of course not. No, goddamn it, I told you: this was my first. My starter marriage. You met her, I know that. Kathryn.”

“No,” I say, “I don’t remember her. But you weren’t married to Diana so long either.”

“Maybe not,” he mutters, “but I loved her. Especially after we were divorced. A fate-prank. She loved someone else before I married her and she loved him while I was married to her, and she loves him now. The dog and I sit out here and we think about her, and about the business that I own, the coffee business. I don’t actually know what the dog thinks about.” A little air pocket of silence opens up between us. I hear him breathing, and I look down at his clasped hands. One of the hands reaches into his pants pocket for a dog treat, which he hands to Junior, who gobbles it down.